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Starting this week, those downloading movies, TV shows and music illegally in the U.S. are going to start getting called out for committing Internet fouls. Copyright holders RIAA and MPAA in partnership with five major Internet service providers are launching the "Copyright Alert System" a.k.a. "Six Strikes" a.k.a. "The Copyright Surveillance Machine." What does it mean?

If you get your Internet through AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable or Verizon and you're one of the millions who prefer downloading Game of Thrones, Dexter, and the Big Bang Theory for free through illicit channels, you may get a letter from your ISP letting you know that your copyright transgression has been spotted by the copyright holders' ref. The "ref" is Thomson Reuters-owned firm MarkMonitor, which has 100 employees in its anti-piracy group and a suite of automated tools for watching Torrent sites to catch the IP addresses sharing and downloading content.

"We see 20-30 million infringements every day," said Thomas Sehested, who is in charge of antipiracy services and technology at MarkMonitor. "Most people are unaware of how public everything they do online is. Whether they download illegal software or post to their Twitter page, a lot of people are unaware of how public it is, if you’re looking for it."

The RIAA and MPAA's members tell MarkMonitor which shows, movies and songs to look for, and it then performs its monitoring magic and sends along shame lists to the ISPs. (Interestingly, the porn industry which has long complained of the toll of illegal downloading on its profits was left out of the Six Strikes deal.) Each ISP comes up with its own system for "gotcha" emails to their customers but they'll generally go like this: Copyright scofflaws will get up to six warnings, that grow more and more dire -- first offering educational opportunities ("Do you know what IP ownership is, little boy?"), then mandatory education (You must acknowledge that you know what copyright infringement is before you can access the Internet.), and finally punishment in the form of slowed Internet speed for two to three days. After six warnings, do the MPAA and RIAA storm troopers raid your house and smash your computer to bits? Nope, at that point they just assume that you're not capable of reform and you stop getting warnings. Is this actually going to stop pirates from going after their entertaining digital booty?

The system was negotiated by industry group the Center for Copyright Information, which became the RIAA and MPAA's only hope after the dramatic demise of SOPA/PIPA -- legislation that would have forcibly enlisted advertisers, merchants and search providers in the fight against piracy. CCI, which has an unofficial but approving nod from the Obama administration, has an annual budget of up to $2 million jointly funded by the RIAA, MPAA and the participating ISPs. Its role, beyond working out the logistics of the system, is the creation of the educational materials for those slapped with a copyright dunce hat. The Center already helps six-year-olds in understanding copyright, says the center's executive director Jill Lesser, providing educational materials that are distributed in schools.

"We'll also collect and analyze the data to see whether the alerts are working," says Lesser. "We're hoping the vast majority of people who are not intent on being pirates will respond to this. Undergirding the process is taking the large percentage of casual infringers and educating them about where they can find legal content."

In other words, CCI is hoping to teach people not to search for "free download of Walking Dead" and click on the first site that turns up, and instead turn to Amazon or iTunes.

Will it work? We often incorrectly think that what we're doing on the Internet is seen by no one. Simply getting notified that your illegal downloading has caught someone's eye could be a deterrent. Many academic studies have found that the act of being watched makes us better citizens, so much so that just putting "eye" stickers on a tip jar makes us more likely to fork over some cash. Perhaps the warning system will work not because of fear of having slow Internet for a couple of days but because of the sensation of surveillance that the system will create. And if nothing else, it might notify people with open Wi-Fi that other people are jumping on their network for questionable downloading purposes.

"I think it’s going to be reasonably effective," says Ernesto (who goes by that name alone), editor in chief of TorrentFreak, a website that covers pirate news and has been covering Six Strikes since talk of it first surfaced in 2011. "For consumers, it’s not a bad thing. I think there are a lot of casual downloaders who do it because it’s easy. A big group of those will be scared if they get these messages and will stop. They won't know how to prevent these messages or not get caught.”

Those who profess to be innocent can challenge their warnings in hopes of not having their Internet slowed down. There's an arbitration process to challenge a warning -- say if you in fact had the right to distribute the file or if the file falls under fair use -- that costs $35; if you win the case, that fee gets reimbursed.

It'll be interesting to see if it works -- or if it just results in a flood of users to services like Kim Dotcom's Mega, where private cyberlockers make for less transparent media consumption. Regardless, it's an interesting voluntary partnership between rights holders and Internet service providers, given the failure of enacting legislation around this, and gives copyright holders a way to communicate -- if indirectly -- with the people consuming their content for free online.

Correction (March 1): This post was edited to make a correction and a clarification. MarkMonitor is owned by Thomson Reuters not Reuters. A sentence was clarified to make clear that the company has 100 employees in its anti-piracy group, not 100 employees total.